March 20 to April 22, 2017
980 Madison Avenue, between 76th and 77th Streets
New York City, nahmadcontemporary.com

Though this exhibition of the Spanish artist Antoni Tàpies (1924 – 2012) spanning a thirty-year period of his career presents what seem to be ten randomly selected works: Neither a representative overview of his output, nor a chronology of his work’s development, the exhibition instead provokes close readings of individual works, and of the material and philosophical variations among them.

Noticeably excluded are the classic years of the 1950s – ’70s, a period during which Tàpies’s works negotiated the cultural abyss that World War II left in its wake. Those materially brutal works expressed both his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, and the postwar urban landscape. Bridging the ethos of the French Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism, works from that period are splattered with paint, inscribed with gestural marks, and incorporate found materials and objects.

My first impression was that this exhibition indicates how, by the ’70s, Tàpies’s primitivism and ferocity had been tamed: the tactility of his work had become refined, and his vocabulary of signs and symbols made more accessible. His use of found objects and low materials no longer represented a challenge to painting’s conventions—instead his use of household materials such as the gray woolen blanket that provides the ground for Black Mark and Arrows (1978) is formalist, and the earthy substance and water faucet in Aixeta (2003) appears marked by a faux naïveté. Gone is the correspondence between Tàpies’s work and the early neo-Dadaist works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, which had made Tàpies of interest to painters in the 1980s, such as Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Yet, all is not lost. There is something here, which might have gone unnoticed if this show consisted of more classic works or were more tightly curated. Given this selection, it appears that by the ’70s, Tàpies was no longer seeking existential agony and beauty in the abject. This less familiar Tàpies seems to be engaged in the more Postmodern project of questioning: what does painting do, what might painting have the capacity to record? This doubtfulness is suggested by the slowness of these works. The gestural marks are no longer abrupt or spontaneous; instead they depict images. Their materiality is now a formal device as well as a sign. Subsequently, the effect of this is something akin to what happens in later works by Francis Bacon and Robert Motherwell—artists who, like Tàpies, had used gesture, earlier in their careers, to communicate urgency, intuitiveness, and intensity.

The earliest painting in the show, Door-Wall (1970), is almost a tabula rasa—a stripped-down version of his signature “matter paintings” from the ’50s. Unlike those, this one consists of a thin, lightly textured, beige rectangle made of paint mixed with sand and glue. Its edges are irregular and convey a sense that they might crumble at any moment. Anchored to the bottom edge, the rectangle is bound on three sides by a raw canvas border, its bottom edge also bearing a series of what might be read as scuff marks or fingerprints. Within the margins there are scratchy pencil lines that simultaneously re-enforce the door-ness of the image, and its provisionality.

There are two ways to read Door-Wall: literally, or as a metaphor—an image designed to call something else to mind. In contrast, Composition (1972) presents little to no ambiguity. It literally appears to be what it is: a composition consisting of a burlap weaving mounted slightly askew on a piece of dark cloth. Within the textured surface of the burlap is another composition, tripartite in structure. Its upper half is a tight, patterned weave; the lower half a looser, irregular weave, with fringe along the bottom edge. On either side of the burlap rectangle are bundles of twisted galvanized wire, individual strands of which are woven horizontally into the burlap. Of course we can read Composition as an illustration of figure-ground relationships, and as such, an analogy for painting itself. It has all the elements: line, surface, form… but, unlike in Door-Wall, these elements are presented without being indexical.

The painting Black Mark and Arrows (1978) seems to further elaborate Tàpies’s self-referentiality and formalist strategy. These concerns order three later painting as well: To Painting (1989), Base-Matter (1995), and Four Stripes (1998. The other works in the exhibition are more varied; there are two assemblages that include found objects and four late works from the early 2000s, which are image-based: a still-life, a landscape, and two paintings representing hands. Some of these latter works include written words as well.

From the diversity of works included in Paintings, 1970 – 2003, I conclude that over these thirty years, Tàpies became concerned with painting as a realm of representation. By alternating between the symbolic and formal, the works call attention to the artist’s evolving understanding of painting as both thing and analogy; and his appreciation over time of painting’s artificiality and theatrics, as well as its potential authenticity.

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July 21 to August 12, 2016
185 Varick Street (at King Street)
New York City

William Corwin’s chunky objects, fragmentary assemblages, and thematically installed aggregates are discursive, and recursive works. A veritable time traveler, the knowledge that fills his heterogeneous, interdisciplinary, and multicultural sculptures veer from the mystical to the mundane. His point of view is both speculative and rooted in history and Western Metaphysics. Meanwhile, his aesthetic is intentionally crude, sometimes verging on the abject.

On entering his current exhibition, which is titled “Champollion”, we are greeted by a single rectangular slab-like, translucent sculpture in Lucite. Illuminated by lights installed in its pedestal, the somewhat abstract, minimalist Double Doors of the Horizon is neither pristine, nor like so many of the other objects in the show rough-hewn—unique in its form and materiality, it duly stands on its own. The two parallel holes that pierce the upper third make it resemble a scale model of the swinging kitchen doors in a restaurant, or, perhaps, the peepholes through which one views Marcel Duchamp’s Etant donnés. Given its title, neither referent rings true, however. These are, instead, the doors of perception through which one passes in the quest for awareness and transcendence. What lies beyond, literally, is a large stepped display-stand, made of rough construction grade plywood. This structure, placed on the diagonal, occupies the center of the gallery. It has three tiers on one-side (facing the gallery’s door) and two in the rear. Its top surfaces, on which Corwin has installed his sculptures, are painted a bone white.

The show’s title, “Champollion”, is references Jean-François Champollion, the French Egyptologist who deciphered the Rosetta stone. Hieroglyphs are a pictorial form of writing in which each image is a complete concept. From this we may conclude that Corwin’s objects consisting of pre-existing bits of detritus and iconic references are meant to combine to create a new category of hieroglyph. If we are to unlock Corwin’s ideographs, he seems to be telling us we must engage his works as if we were archeologists and cryptologists. In this endeavor, we are left us to our own devices, without a lexicon. The collection of objects that make up Champollion consists of small sculptures cast in lead, plaster and resin – each material exploited to a different end.

These objects invite categorization by format and structure. For instance, Juggernaut or Rath Yattra (2013), Herm (2013), Ouroboros (2014) HDT (Henry David Thoreau) 2013 and Bathtub Madonna (2013) are all cast in Hydrocal, and are monochromatic and cube-like, with each side consisting of an assemblage of images in relief. Madonna, (2016) Lion (2016) and Man (2016) are freestanding figures cast in different materials, whose images are somewhat deformed by the process of their production and by their roughly worked surfaces. Ox, Eagle, and another decapitated head (St. John) (all 2015), are still life-like objects with smooth surfaces and cast in lead. All of these works are relatively small, the largest being Herm at 17 inches tall.

By using parts to designate whole concepts, and things, Corwin’s sculptural hieroglyphs can be said to constitute a visual shorthand. Subsequently, in Bathtub Madonna he has embedded into an irregular brick structure, a bathtub Madonna — a time honored lawn ornament in working-class, catholic neighborhoods. The work is in the powdery blue color associated with the Madonna. In this manner, Corwin joins together the sacred and the profane. Reciprocally, the four castings of the single image of Lion raises questions about its possible referent. Ancient Abyssinian sculptures of seated lions, used as temple guardians, come to mind, and from here one may think of Haile Selassie, venerated as the Lion of Judah in the Rastafarian religion. This connection to Selassie has to do with the idea that among the differing races that descend from Noah’s son Ham’s children were the Cush from whom the Ethiopians are descended. This game of associations, and connections runs through Corwin’s works, bouncing back and forth within each piece, and between them. Corwin recently spent time in Ethiopia where he visited various biblical sites.

In the end, in part because of Corwin’s crude or improvised manner, I could not resist thinking of this installation as being a post-apocalyptic society’s display of objects representing its mythic history and origins. In this scenario, Corwin’s hieroglyphs are comparable to the role the book “The Wizard of Oz” plays in the movie, “Zardoz“ (1974; dir. John Boorman), or the mash up of Celtic Mythology, St. Eustace, and Punch and Judy in Russell Hoban’s novel, Riddley Walker (1980). In both cases, totally misunderstood narratives come to serve as models not only for cautionary tales, but also for the reconstruction of society. If this interpretation in any way corresponds to Corwin’s project, then central to this endeavor is an attempt, on his part, to make sense of the existential appeal of the ontological and the mythic.

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June 8 to August 7, 2016
643 Park Avenue (between 66th and 67th streets)
New York, 212 616 3930

Middlebrow culture has long been a contentious territory: it was critically viewed by Modernists as an ineffective attempt to water down and vulgarize innovative cultural endeavors, to produce a faux intellectual lifestyle that can be mass-produced for its status and entertainment value. Post-Modernists deemed the middlebrow edgy, clever, knowing, stylish, and formally inventive in its eclectic appropriation of the pretenses of a high culture, and their insertion into the everyday world of its audience. Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed embraces middlebrow culture: his art is for those who want to be in on the joke. One painting is a joke about Jackson Pollock, a video refers to Piero Manzoni’s cans of the artist’s shit, stacked chairs and battered cardboard boxes nod to Sol LeWitt and Minimalism, his paintings in varied styles are about taste(less-ness).

“The Back Door,” now at the Park Avenue Armory, surveys work from Creed’s more than 20-year-long career. The exhibition’s title can be taken in any number of ways — servants, trades people and less than respectable visitors come to the back door. It also has some naughty sexual connotations as it refers to anal sex. While I’m sure that this title was meant to conjure up these associations, in this case it quite literally, refers to the actual rear door of the Armory, which Creed has motorized so that it continuously opens and closes. That piece is titled Shutters Opening and Closing (2016) and offers three events in one: the slow opening of the doors, the simultaneous dramatic shedding of light into the almost empty, cavernous interior of the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, and finally a glimpse of people walking by on Lexington Ave. This brought to my mind the allegory of Plato’s Cave, in that Creed implies that we, the audience, live in a shadow world and that without his reminder, we would not be aware that just outside, real living beings go on with their lives unconcerned with what is going on in the Armory.

There are four other pieces scattered throughout that employ the on/off, open/close theme; one is in the big corridor, where a massive set of curtains, usually decorously tied back, hang loose, endlessly opening and closing. In the elaborate Veterans Room, a white grand piano on an oriental rug, slowly opens only to immediately slam shut with a resounding bang. The other is the backdoor to the Parlor Room, called A Door Opening and Closing (1995), behind which, in the Parlor, The Lights Going On and Off (1996) is enacted by two rows of white, globular lights hanging from the ceiling. In combining these two works he has synchronized the so when the door is closed the lights are on and when the door is open the lights are off.

The only thing that occupies the Drill Hall is a large screen hung from the ceiling on which six videos are screened. These three-minute-long videos play alternately with the opening and closing of the rear door. The videos are of different women of various ages and in varied settings. The camera slowly zooms in on each woman’s mouth; when it arrives at its destination she opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue to reveal half-eaten foods stuffs, then closes her mouth to swallow. The seemingly obvious reference for these benignly undignified videos are those porn films in which women showily take cum in their mouths and then swallow.

In a series of small rooms along one side of the Drill Hall, a retrospective of Creed’s videos has been installed, one to a room. In one, against an immaculate white ground, young Asian women squat to take a shit, in another video we are again given a clean, white space in which different women enter the frame to repeatedly induce vomiting so as to produce a Pollock-like “painting” on the floor. A third video gives a close-up of a single female breast as a disembodied/decontextualized sex object. As for videos of men, there is one in which a man angrily smashes bouquets of flowers against the floor and another, shot like a home movie, in which the artist in bathing trunks is shown at the beach, wiggling about striking various pin-up poses that allude to both male and female, soft-core porn. These videos, which are meant to represent Creed’s investigation into the basic tenets of human existence, though often pathetic and dehumanizing, actually verge on the banal.

Beyond the videos, Creed has painted the upper walls of the Armory’s grand corridor and staircase with a pattern of diagonal black bars, which break for the many portraits, architectural woodwork, display cases and his own paintings. In the rooms along this corridor, Creed has installed his paintings and sculptures. Subsequently, in the Colonel’s Reception Room he has installed Work No. 2497: half the air in a given space (2015). It promises to be a crowd pleaser, the room half-filled with large white balloons is a tight squeeze for visitors moving through it. The work is akin to an oversized ball pit, like those children play in at Chuck E. Cheese restaurants. In other rooms, such as the Library and the Field and Staff Rooms, he has installed sculptures made by stacking battered cardboard boxes on top of one another in descending size. Others consist of likewise stacks of secondhand furniture. Other sculptures use stacking and repetition, as with an 8 foot high stack of half-inch-thick sheets of plywood, which is as high as the sheets are long. In the Library, he has placed numerous small objects, among them a progression of potted cacti (Work No. 2376, 2016), and a nod to the days of protest against the military and war, he has installed in a display densely packed with mostly silver trophies, two small clenched fists — one gold-plated, the other bronze — as such reminding us that context is everything.

Creed is part prankster, designer, dilettante and entertainer, and he’s completely serious about the sampling of borderline banal contrasts, ludicrous situations. So much of Creed’s work refers to easy art, and to easy, tchotchke-like “folk” forms — virtuosity is antithetical to his homemade mode. Staged as a non-spectacle, this survey of new and older works is intent on engaging and potentially provoking his audience to consider each work or encounter as an act of (perhaps bad) faith. All of this is so well balanced as to be indeterminable as to whether it is implicitly culturally critical in its silliness, or if the joke’s on us for thinking so. All of this brings me to the conclusion that Creed is clever in the ways he turns the challenging endeavors of his predecessors into something accessible and playfully minor. But, then again this is part of the definition of what it is to be middlebrow.

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Lee Mullican: The Fifties at Susan Inglett Gallery
April 28 to June 4, 2016
522 W. 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 647 9111

Undaunted by the challenge of the New York School, in the early 1950s on the West Coast there emerged an approach to abstract painting that did not participate in the conflicting vision of the Romantic (painterly) and Classicist (geometric) traditions. On the East Coast, this battle had led to the idea of an “abstract” art that was to represent nothing more than itself. The West Coast variant was instead rooted in a mystical tradition in which the task of the artist was to reveal the truth behind appearances. Using non-Western and Native American sources, Lee Mullican, and contemporaries such as Mark Tobey, was interested in the pictorial, and the imagistic power of abstraction, rather than the all-at-once-ness sought by their East Coast contemporaries. Two recent exhibitions of Mullican’s work, at Susan Inglett Gallery and James Cohan Gallery, show his development of abstraction on the West Coast. The Susan Inglett show deals with Mullican’s work of the 1950s, while James Cohan features work from the late ‘50s through the ‘60s.

Though there is a long history of transcendental abstract painting in the US, seldom is it as formally radical as Mullican’s. What differentiates his approach from that of his East Coast counterparts, such as Richard Pousette-Dart, is that Mullican, rather than trying to give representation to the non-objective realm, sought instead to stimulate the sensations of reality as perceived by the senses and the mind. To this end, Mullican employed the intense visual patterns associated with migraines, epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness — e.g. states that produce mind-numbing optical patterns and hallucinations.

Mullican didn’t differentiate between abstraction and figuration and as such was mainly an abstractionist who distorted the codes of representation for expressive ends. Though aware of the importance of form, he comes to the abstract via his ambition at producing visionary images through which one could aesthetically experience the power and force of the world of mind and energy. Mullican’s vision therefore, contrasted sharply with the existentialism of Barnett Newman, the Gothic vision of Clyfford Still, or the primordial imagery of Mark Rothko. All of these artists envisioned an external reality capable of overwhelming and dwarfing the viewer, an experience of the Sublime meant to remind viewers of the raw power of nature and human fragility. Mullican’s sublime is objectless: fields of color and sensation, and his paintings are therefore intended to deliver up a sensory overload that will induce in the viewer an awareness of still another realm.

In San Francisco, where he moved following World War II, Mullican met the British-born abstract-Surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, who is credited with making some of the first poured paintings in the late 1930s. Austrian Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen also had a significant effect on Mullican during this period. Mullican came to share these artists’ interest in Eastern and Native American mysticism. Bound together by a desire to make works that would tap into altered consciousness that could serve as a doorway to infinite possibilities, they formed the short-lived Dynaton Group. Its name was derived from Paalen’s influential journal called Dyn, published in Mexico City between 1942 and 1944.

Mullican’s earliest works, shown at Susan Inglett Gallery, combine references to Aboriginal dream paintings, Native American iconography, and sci-fi-like cosmic explosions. Paintings such as The Age of the Desert (1957) are like colored drawings and consist of disjointed cosmic and landscape imagery, pictographs, as well as abstract patterns. Significantly, Mullican introduces into these works an aerial point of view, the source of which was his experience as a cartographer making maps from aerial photographs for the US military during World War II.

Formally more important than the ethnographic references, and the flattening effect of an aerial perspective, are the patterns of matchstick-like slivers of color Mullican began to use in the mid ‘50s. These short, raised lines of color — produced with the edge of the knife used by printers to ink rollers — were a distinctive feature of his work over the course of his career. Mullican distributed hundreds, if not thousands, of these colored striations across the surface of his paintings, forming a field of sensations that detached itself from the picture plane, creating a new dimension: an optical space that was divorced from the underlying imagery and abstract forms. At times, his striations lend themselves to creating tapestry-like effects that bring Gustav Klimt to mind. In works such as The Arrival of the Quetzalcoatl (1963), shown at James Cohan Gallery, Mullican shows one can be fearless when it comes to the decorative, in that it need not become a liability. In this work the tapestry effect and the multiple erratic zigzag patterns, intense colors produce a hallucinatory optical effect. An earlier artwork, Transfigured Night (1962), with its tonal sonorities, harmonic reds and oranges, and pattern of pictographs, is tasteful and hip to the point one can image it as album cover for the cool jazz of Dave Brubeck and Lee Konitz.

Only a handful of the works of the ‘60s and ‘70s are truly abstract and these, such as Mediation on the Vertical (1962), are predominantly monochromatic. Rather than creating spectral symbols or camouflaged figures, Mullican fills the plane with agitated and convoluted patterns, forming overall rhythmic fields of intense color and fluctuating densities. His signature matchsticks of color optically attach and detach themselves from the surface creating pathways, trajectories and patterns that float in the space between viewer and the painting’s surface. These works are no longer dependent on graphic imagery but on forms that are a result of color and the density of marks. The Arrival of the Quetzalcoatl, with its aggressive field of jostling patterns and forms, and its greater spontaneity, is one of Mullican’s most accomplished works. Though not included in these two exhibitions, Mullican’s paintings from the same period — in which stylized ethnographic imagery dominates, rather than painterly effects — appear to verge on kitsch. Yet I wonder if this preference is a consequence of my viewing them with prejudiced eyes, schooled in the style and history of the New York School. Despite these limitations, Mullican’s works still resonate, and demonstrate that during the ‘50s and early ‘60s, AbEx and New York were not the only game in play.

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February 27 to April 10, 2016
205 Hudson Street (at Canal Street)
New York, 212 772 4991

“Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni,” an exhibition of work by the short-lived group BMPT (Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni) now at Hunter College, is sparse. It consists of only four artworks and two vitrines of documentation, mainly in French. Yet, given its subject, it is complete, though also thoroughly lacking. The show in the main gallery consists of one painting by each of the group’s members; in this sense the exhibition is complete. As for the deficiency, the show’s smallness is in part compensated for by the exhibition “Critical Gestures & Contested Spaces: Art in France in the 1960s,” which documents the varied groups, artists and political practices that constituted the neo-Dadaist and high Modernist art scene of ‘60s France (mainly Paris). This exhibit recounts the context from which BMPT emerged. For some, this history and the artists and groups that participated in it may be fairly unfamiliar. The inclusion of this exhibition demonstrates that BMPT was not unique in their endgame strategy, its political endeavors, or, for that matter, were they the most radical.

In the main gallery, one painting consists of alternating vertical green stripes and bands of raw canvas. At each end, the stripes are hand-painted opaque white. The stripes are all of equal width. Another painting has a black circle with a pristine white dot at its core, which marks the center of the canvas. The stripe painting and the painting of the black circle are both on stretched square canvases of equal size. The third work, un-stretched canvas pinned to the wall, consists of five alternating horizontal bands of gray and white. The last white band, at the bottom of the canvas, is about a third of the width of the others. The fourth is a piece of oilcloth pinned to the wall and imprinted with uniformly spaced, brick red, marks made using a number 50 brush at 30-centimeter intervals. (It is important to note that all four paintings in this exhibition vary slightly in format, size, proportions and dates, yet are representative of each artist’s motif.)

BMPT’s works structurally consist of a horizontal, a vertical, a configuration, and mark-making, respectively. Buren paints vertical stripes, Parmentier horizontal ones, the black circle on a white ground is made by Mosset, and the uniform brush marks, repeated at 30-centimeter intervals, are Toroni’s. Each of these artists was committed to producing only their own motif, which serves as a logo. While these works are handmade and authored by different artists, they are stylistically anonymous. Together, these four paintings by BMPT represent an index of a type of abstract painting that is identified with the anti-relational, anti-compositional ethos of Minimalism in the States, and in Europe it would be understood to be derived from Art Concrete, or perhaps Zero.

Between January and December 1967, BMPT had the opportunity to manifest their critical stance in four highly public events. The nature of these events was influenced by the Situationist notion of intervention — a disruption of the norm. The documentation of these events is displayed in two vitrines, and they’re described in a supplement, which also supplies us with BMPT’s manifesto of January 1967 in which they conclude “We are not painters.”

In all four events their paintings serve as tropes; in the case of the 18^th Salon of Young Painters, they produced their works in public under a banner with their names. This was accompanied by an audio tape that advised their audience to be more intelligent. At day’s end, they took their works away, installing a second banner so that the two banners together stated “Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, and Toroni Do Not Exhibit.” In another, their paintings served as décor, the setting for a performance that never occurs: the audience sits waiting for 45 minutes, staring at their paintings. In their fourth and final manifestation, slide shows of traditional painting subjects — such as landscapes, nudes, etc. — were projected onto their works. These projections were also accompanied by an audio track that admonished their audience that “Art is an Illusion,” “Art is a Dream,” etc. With the fourth manifestation BMPT’s artistic and political experiment came to an end. Parmentier, in December of 1967, denounced Buren, Mosset, and Toroni for their willingness to deviate from the agreed upon formula; he proclaimed that by abandoning strict repetition they “situate themselves in a regressive manner with respect to this moral position.”

In each of their manifestations, BMPT reduced their works to mere props, and in doing so, sought to expose art’s commodification, the rendering of culture as spectacle under capitalism, as well as their own complicity (and that of everyone else). Problematically, with this exhibition, we are given a painting show: an exposition of trophies, emptied of their critical function. BMPT works have been captured, and tamed and are now loaded (down) with the aura of art — the very thing these works were meant to escape. Consequently, the critical nature of BMPT’s position is lost. They now signal some other message, one more aesthetic and formal than political. We are shown examples of the standard motifs agreed to in 1966, and even these diverge from BMPT’s standard model in that they do not adhere to their initial commitment to uniformity and repetition. In this, exhibition, BMPT’s radical proposition, meant to challenge notions of artistic authorship and originality, is also lost.

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Dominique Lévy supplies the back story to French-born Polish artist Roman Opalka with a show of works from 1959 to 1963 that precede his breakthrough to the series for which he is best known, 1 – ∞, also presented here: the precisely painted horizontal rows of numbers in white on a gray ground. Upstairs from the display of Infinity canvases are seven works on paper titled Etude sur le mouvement and two works titled Chronome, 1963. The Etudes are typical of European gestural abstract painting of that period in that Opalka is engaged in filling the surface of the paper with improvised black ink scrawls, marks and squiggles. The resulting compositions are irregular masses floating on the empty page. By the end of this period Opalka’s marks have become less and less expressionistic as he covers the entire canvas with small dots, resulting in black monochromes. He then abandons this approach, but not entirely, as he will continue to be concerned with filling the painting’s surface with marks for the rest of his life. The principle difference is that his marks are less subjective and more logical once they are numbers, which define their own structure and order as well as being both abstract and representational.

The infinity series was the result of Opalka deciding in 1965 to count to infinity and in turn, paint each number in sequence. By the time of his death in 2011 he had filled 233 canvases. they are all the same size and all inscribed with numbers drawn with near machine-like consistency. The count begins in the upper right corner and ends lower left. Each painting contains 20-30,000 consecutive numbers. Each numeral that makes up these numbers is slightly lighter then the previous one. The fade is a result of the diminishing amount of paint on the brush as he moves from one numeral to the next. The density of white signals the beginning of the next number.

At a distance the numbers’ differing densities form optical patterns as a result of which the works initially resemble blotchy monochromes. Opalka considered each painting to be a detail, a fragment of a continuum punctuated by small indifferent incidents. The earliest paintings were of white numerals on a black ground, but over the course of the years Opalka began to add one percent of white to the background color. By 2008 he was painting white numbers onto white grounds. According to gallery notes, Opalka recorded himself saying each number as he worked.

Accompanying the paintings, though much less interesting than them, are Opalka’s self-portraits in which at the end of each work session he would take a passport style photograph of himself. Subsequently, we have a history of his aging appearance.

Like Samuel Beckett, Opalka found incredibly economic solutions to making works that are seemingly about everything and nothing at all. Opalka’s paintings are at once formal, process oriented, personal, conceptual, optical, autographic, ethical, aesthetic, concerned with phenomena of repetition, variation, etc., and yet are not about anything more than filling the canvas, duration and persistence (obsession or compulsion) notwithstanding. The works are hermetic in that they tell us nothing about process, time, numbers, mathematics, art, or for that matter about their maker — excepting his resolute commitment to the singular nature of his project.

If parallels are to be drawn with other artists of the 1960s, the two that most immediately come to mind are Ad Reinhardt and On Kawara, both of whom were also committed to rigorous programs of repetition and variation — although each artist arrived at this everything-in-nothing position by very different routes and to differing ends. All three strip painting of subjectivity as much as they can, nearly reducing it to pure information. Reinhardt’s so-called “black” paintings are all squares divided into nine smaller squares and are uniformly painted in differing shades of black. Kawara’s paintings, also begun in the ’60s, conform to one of eight standard sizes, ranging from 8 by 10 inches to 61 by 89 inches and all horizontal in orientation. The dates are hand-painted and are always centered on the canvas and painted white, though the background colors variy. The front page of a newspaper, which corresponds to the day and place the painting was made, accompanies each painting.

Despite their aesthetic differences, however, beyond the repetitive format, each of them has taken as their subject a different aspect of time. For Kawara, time is punctuated by events; for Opalka it is a continuum; and with Reinhardt time is duration marking the transition from one state to another. Each artist seeks to use painting to generate that key existentialist concerns with “being” in time — that is of being present and encountering the real. Opalka uses interval as his means to index our relationship to Newtonian time as something measurable within which events take place and are experienced.

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I am not a fan of Jeff Koons. It is not a matter of his being a symptom of a culture gone bad, or that the work is self-indulgent. It is simply that sometime after the early stainless steel pieces, organized at the Whitney under the title Statuary, I found that it became uninteresting — and over the long years had stopped thinking about it. This retrospective has not changed my mind but it does have me rethinking the nature of his subject, which is not popular culture but the artist himself. The key to Koons is his narcissism — whether actual or faked I do not know.

In a funny way, therefore, I have a newfound respect for his conceptual complexity. A key work that supports my premise of narcissism is not, as it happens, included in the exhibition. The New Jeff Koons (1980) is a self-portrait of what appears to be an enlarged family photo of the artist-to-be exuding the wellbeing of a middle-class boy circa 1960. The young Jeff sits at a desk with a coloring book, a crayon poised in his fingers. This staged photo seems to imply that ‘The New” of the title is meant to indicate perfection in the sense of both pure as well as reinvented.

Koons identifies with his iconographical subjects — they represent both how he hopes to present himself to others as well as his fears as to how he might be perceived. We find the hero, the king, and the demi-god alongside the comedian, the cartoon character strong man and the gorilla. Mirrors and polished surfaces, his most recurrent motif, are in essence narcissistic, a product of someone who in all ways is watching himself. His portrayal of women reveals his fear of them, and his adolescent obsession, which reduces them to sexual fantasy and object. Within his work we also find a record of all he has done to become a celebrity, a star, a success and all he has done to hide his secrets behind a veil of postmodern pastiche, eclecticism, and appropriation.

Such, indeed, Koons’s cleverness often conceals his serious intellectual abilities that I have to consider whether I have been taken in, that the discerned biography is a red herring rather than a sincere expression of the artist’s psyche. This encrypted biography is actually part of Koons’s masterly invention of himself not as artist but as huckster, a con man that promises his audience what they really want, glamour and allure. Yet, even with his declared mission of making things alright, he has made no commercial concession to his popular audience. Instead of creating a mass market for his work he has instead made ever more expensive works — although recently he has signed a deal with H&M to design handbags.

Problematically, to this day Koons’s works do not escape the gravity of Duchamp, or that of the notion of appropriation, which permits everything to become a readymade via its re-presentation, re-contextualization, or re-purposing, the mainstay aesthetics of the early ‘80s. His works in themselves are insignificant — even with the seriousness and insight one can afford them in hindsight, they have not been influential or culturally affective the way, say, Warhol has been. What saves Koons from being reducible to reflections on our material culture and the semiotics of objects is that there is something more personal in his focus on domesticity, perfection (newness), infallibility (expansiveness) and identity. Without these tropes the imagery Koons employs would have revealed itself to be little more than an intellectual form of flower arranging — a motif, in fact, of his early work.

The young Koons, we find at the Whitney, was an assembler who juxtaposes existent ideas and practices. His early works exploit the fact that Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptualism shared an antecedent in Duchamp’s readymade. Koons combines these three movements in cartoonish, multi-colored, cheap inflatable flowers, arranged on or in front of acrylic mirrors so as to multiply their image. The resulting arrangement, as in Inflatable Flowers (Tall Purple, Tall Orange) 1979, make a comic reference to Warhol’s flower paintings while Sponges and Single Double-Sided Floor Mirror, 1978 seems to reference Robert Smithson’s mirror displacements of the late 1960s.

The Flowers are followed by a series of pop-minimalist assemblages in which he combines banks of fluorescent lights recalling Dan Flavin with such household items as a tea pot and a Hoover vacuum cleaner. These were followed by a series consisting of differing models of Hoover vacuums sealed into Plexiglas boxes. More than introducing another of Koons most persistent themes — a pristineness and purity associated with newness — these works produced between 1978–80 also give expression to Koons’s initial intuition that the readymade has the capacity to transform everyday objects into a commentary on the confluence of modernity, technology, aesthetics, mass production, taste and their illusionary nature.

Combining readymade imagery, with which he personally identifies, with a finish-fetish aesthetic and cunning intellectualism, Koons tracks the process by which all aspects of our lives, desires and fantasies — even our neuroses — are objectified, commodified, and culturally sold back to us. Importantly, he does this without implicit or explicit judgment or criticism. Viewed in this manner, his works’ content and potential meaning lies in his shrewd ability to use a thing’s attributes to create analogies and metaphor, rather than commentary. For instance, while his Gazing Ball (Farnese Hercules, 2013), and Popeye (2009-12) respectively reference classicism and comics, in turn they each also represent the demi-god, the hero, and the strong man. The irony here is that Hercules is made of plaster and Popeye is carved from granite. Subsequently, along with Buster Keaton, Kiepenkerl, Michael Jackson with Bubbles, Self-Portrait, Hulk (Organ), Gazing Ball (Mailbox), etc. these works in passing index masculinity. Throughout his work other such indices can be assembled concerning women, (love, class, and childhood). Another pattern set early on, is that for each new subject and form he employs a new technology, as well as the highest production values that industry can supply. As such, his works also represent the best that money can buy.

There is a significant shift in Koons’s works grouped as Equilibrium (1985) where he introduces celebrity basketballs afloat in steel and glass tanks. This is followed by Luxury and Degradation, which consists of liquor ads and stainless steel sculptures of kitsch objects. With this work Koons becomes the maker of stand-alone 3D images, rather than representing and arranging objects. At the same time, he has decided to make himself the subject of his work. This is the moment in which Koons appears to win the coveted position held by Warhol, left vacant by his death and that of his heir apparent, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Yet rather than model himself on the idiot savant Warhol played, Koons emerges as the glad-handed politician and big smile huckster who is willing to repackage for his middlebrow audience high-art as novelty and fetish, and the artist as personality.

He begins to cast in stainless steel things such as Jim Beam-J.B. Turner Train and Louis XIV (1986), producing up-scale facsimiles of souvenir shop items and collectables in glazed porcelain or polychrome wood. These are exhibited under the heading Banality. Koons employs advance technologies, skilled labor, and high production values for these works but as before, these items are not a portrait of our culture so much as loaded meditations on sex, desire, success, masculinity, competence, and self. I suspect both Michael Jackson with Bubbles and Pink Panther (both 1988) are surrogate self-portraits for they seem to sum up Koons’s sense of himself, whether via the tragic creative childlike genius of Jackson or the sly cartoon character whose popularity spurs it on from being a film title character to a classic cartoon series with international appeal. A clue that he might be indexing these images to himself is the contemporary portfolio of four Art Magazine Ads each featuring Koons projecting a different persona.

Made in Heaven (1989-1991) consists of works we might see as collaboration between Koons and his then wife, Italian porn star turned politician Ilona Staller (La Cicciolina). With these works he gives his life over to the spectacle of tabloid journalism and male fantasy. The result is images of him and his trophy (La Cicciolina) engaged in sex presented as over-life-size, highly retouched photographs, printed on canvas and/or made into Venetian glass figurines. These softcore, de-eroticized images, rather than emancipating his audience from shame and embarrassment, undo the promise of pornography, announcing that the fulfillment of male fantasy is sterile — all the ambition driven by self doubt and adolescent desire comes to emptiness.

After his acrimonious divorce there appears to be an eight-year break in Koons’s production. Then under the title Easyfun (1999) he produces a series of colored crystal animal head-shaped mirrors, then with Easyfun_Etheral (2000) his studio begins to turn out collage-like paintings that are highly derivative of the works of James Rosenquist, Sigmar Polke and the later paintings of David Salle. Koons attempts to produce two-dimensional works have in general been uninspired. This may be a result of the fact that it is harder to produce iconic images by appropriating, de-contextualizing, or merely representing existent materials.

Between 1994–2003 he appears not to have been able to produce coherent bodies of work as he had previously done, though he continues to group works under various titles, such as Celebration and Popeye. These works form a confused assemblage of assorted inflatable poolside toys and re-runs of earlier imagery such as the up-scaled balloon dog. All these works seem to be about scale, fetishistic surfaces, production values, and illusion — though one may suspect that they in some way are inspired by Koons growing brood. Then with Hulk Elvis (2006–14), Antiquity (2009) and Gazing Ball (2013) Koons turns to the Pop, Classical and the Baroque periods as references. These works collectively appear to be engaged in an extended and perplexing meditation on masculine identity, women and sex. Many of these recent works sport flowering plants (a sign of optimism?). Along with these he has produced oversized sculptures of the baubles one buys as anniversary and Valentine gifts: diamond rings, heart-shaped pendants, bouquets of flowers. Though much is made of Koons’s happy marriage with six children and the (obsessively) perfectly ordered life, one gets the impression from his work that his psychic life is still full of sexual confusion and a conflicted sense of identity. Therefore, it makes perfect sense that his retrospective introduces the never-before-seen Popeye, and ends with a monumental multi-colored sculpture of unformed lumps of Play-Doh.

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